Brand strategy, positioning, and messaging for financial services — asset management, wealth management, insurance and fintech companies

Financial branding is more than a logo, tagline and color palette. Whether you’re an asset manager, wealth management firm, fintech, bank or other finserv provider, your brand is what you are as a firm, what you believe, how you’re different. It’s a powerful tool for fostering mindshare and loyalty, acquiring and retaining clients — and growing your bottom line.

Blending ideas, words and images, a financial services brand is often communicated in split-second interactions with clients and prospects. Word-of-mouth referrals alone won’t build your business. Whether you’re creating a new brand or refreshing an established one, we’ll expertly guide you through the process by:

• Developing a brand marketing strategy and positioning
• Creating a vibrant and consistent verbal and visual identity
• Crafting visual and verbal brand guidelines
• Devising a content strategy to support the brand
• Creating brand marketing strategies to establish and strengthen your reputation—and defend or repair it if needed
• Revisiting your brand as environments change and your company evolves
• Facilitating research to measure results

Tailor a brand strategy to your audience — those seeking asset management, wealth management or other financial services

In today’s competitive finserv landscape, your financial brand needs to resonate powerfully with audiences and elicit an emotional response. Strategy is critical.

We begin with discovery, encompassing:

• Internal interviews with firm leaders and key stakeholders
• Quantitative and qualitative research — focus groups, interviews, surveys
• Communications/marketing audit
• Audience identification and segmentation
• Competitive research

Create brand positioning

Positioning defines and differentiates your company, product or service. It sets the tone and establishes style — through the user experience, your offerings, your business approach and your culture.

Whether your financial brand is established or new, local or global, consumer-facing or B2B, we’ll develop a positioning that is credible, sustainable and distinct and engages your audiences, whether retail or institutional — or both.

Articulate a messaging platform

Amid a crowded and competitive financial services marketplace, messaging provides succinct, distinctive responses to basic questions: Who are you? What do you do? What sets your financial services firm apart?

The spirit and tone of a messaging platform — and often the words themselves — are infused throughout your branded content. That’s why messaging is so crucial and why we focus on proof points that validate your messages.

Create a brand name

Creating and launching a memorable financial brand name requires highly specialized capabilities and a methodical process:

• Developing a brand naming brief that sets the stage for exploration
• Brainstorming ideas across genres, themes or concepts
• Reviewing legal and copyright issues to determine availability
• Trademarking or registration

Design a visual identity

A visual identity should capture your financial brand’s essence and instantaneously express its personality and style through a strong logo complemented by typography, imagery, graphic elements and colors.

Designing these elements to differentiate you and ensure implementation across the entire enterprise and all of your markets takes sophistication. We apply a proven multi-step approach to developing and fully realizing the visual system and applications. This enables us to deliver on your positioning, communicate your personality and values, and be suitable across your business.

Produce brand guidelines

The success of financial branding depends on how consistently it’s carried out across communications and over time. So we create comprehensive guidelines to help your marketers, agency partners, content creators and external vendors understand your verbal and visual brand assets and how to use them. This document captures:

• Your company, product or service story
• Your brand voice and core messages
• Messaging for unique needs or audiences
• Technical specifics for your visual brand elements

Advance your firm’s brand strategy.
Contact us now.